Critique of Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands"
Timothy Snyder’s study of Bloodlands , as the lands themselves, is riddled with puzzles and paradoxes. It is a work that is easy to read but also misread. Facility with Einstein’s concept of “ relativity of simultaneity ”—rather than with that of Ockham’s razor , may help. The most surprising thing about the study is the effusive praise that many reviewers, even historians, have lavished on it. I agree it is an important book, yet I’m not sure that the praise has been for the right reason. After adding up the minuses and subtracting its merits, it is more important that the book’s author is a professor at Yale than that his name is Timothy Snyder. The title is eye-catching and the writing is good. But it is not a book of either high scholarship or a major contribution to our knowledge. Snyder breaks no new ground by telling us that there was an exceptionally blood-soaked patch of land in Eastern Europe or that without the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact we would not have had the war and the